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2006 1: 9AnimationJ. P. Telotte

Ub Iwerks' (Multi)Plain Cinema  

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article

Ub Iwerks’ (Multi)Plain Cinema

J.P. Telotte

Abstract While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often beenpraised as a driving force behind the early success of the WaltDisney Company, his independent work has received scantattention. That relative omission from animation history seemscurious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasison gags involving protean, transformative effects – a character-istic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; and his pioneeringwork on a multiplane camera – a device that would becomecrucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation.This article examines these features to situate his work in termsof American animation’s shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. Itsuggests that we see Iwerks’ cartoons as symptomatic of a largerstruggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emergingrealism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema, and the relative failure of his films as indicativeof an inability to negotiate between these different pulls.

Keywords animation, avant-garde, depth, Fleischer Brothers,Mickey Mouse, multiplane camera, realism, Sergei Eisenstein,Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney

This had always been the objective of modernism: to flatten out, to bringto the surface in order to make the base show itself for what it is. (Leslie,2002: 297)

In his history of the American cartoon, Leonard Maltin (1980) offers arather mediocre assessment of the contributions of a figure who had

animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com)Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol 1(1): 9–24 [1746-8477(200607)]10.1177/1746847706065838

become almost legendary in the field, Ub Iwerks. He describes Iwerksas ‘a second-echelon cartoon producer’ (p. 185) and the products ofhis own studio, primarily the Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper, andComicolor fairytale films, as ‘basically unmemorable cartoons’(p. 192). Similarly, Michael Barrier (1999) has termed Iwerks ananimator of ‘narrow technical skills’ (p. 168) whose cartoons lacked‘a distinct comic or narrative shape’ (p. 166). While both assessmentshave much truth to them, they also suggest a kind of correctiveresponse to a legend that had grown up around Iwerks in light of hiscontributions to the creation of Disney’s iconic figure Mickey Mouse,his near single-handed animation of the first Mickey cartoons, and hisinvolvement in the spectacularly successful Silly Symphony cartoonswith their early and innovative use of synchronized sound. Because ofthese connections it had often been suggested that Iwerks was reallythe genius behind the mouse, or as Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman(1993) put it, ‘the strong foundation on which the [Disney] studiodepended’ in its early years (p. 64). Of course, these views are notnecessarily contradictory, but the relative dismissal of Iwerks’ inde-pendent efforts has begged the question of where his own cartoonswent wrong, and of how someone of near-legendary status could alsobe rather easily relegated to the footnotes of animation history.

Because of his reputation for his drawing speed and seeminglyinnate understanding of the basic principles of the animated cartoon(squash and stretch, recoil, etc.), Iwerks has been described as essen-tially a master technician – a view only reinforced by his professedinterest in mechanisms that would support the animation process, andhis development, after returning to Disney in 1940, of such devices asthe Xerographic Fusing Apparatus for inking cells and the Triple HeadOptical Printer, and his perfection of a sodium traveling matte processfor combining live-action with animation.1 Even when he was runninghis own studio between 1930 and 1936, Iwerks was rumored, afterthe first few years, to have relegated much of the daily supervision ofthe animation process to subordinates. In fact, Michael Barrier (1999)claims that Fleischer alumnus Grim Natwick ‘eventually wound uprunning the studio day-to-day, while Iwerks worked on mechanicalimprovements in the studio’s basement’ (p. 167).2 Yet one of thosetechnical developments would have a marked impact on the repu-tation of the Iwerks cartoons and would forecast similar developmentsat other animation studios in the period, most notably at Disney andthe Fleischer Brothers. This same technical interest might help usbetter situate his works in terms of American animation’s shiftingaesthetic in the 1930s, particularly by helping us see his studio’scartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period betweenthe avant-garde and an emerging realist aesthetic that was closelyaligned with the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema.

That key development, of course, was the multiplane camera, adevice designed to overcome the essential flatness of the animated

10 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1)

image by creating a three-dimensional space in which to photographthe animation cells. Yet it was a development that ultimately broughtlittle success to Iwerks’ films, winning them neither great critical acco-lades in that period nor the embrace of a popular audience. Part of theproblem, as the epigraph to this article implies, is that the criticalcommunity never agreed on the importance of the depth illusion forfurthering animation’s development, so the value of a device for foster-ing this effect remained an open question. In fact, many commentatorsinsisted that the real strength of the animated cartoon as it haddeveloped up to this time lay precisely in the stylistic trait that sodistinguished it from live-action film, that is, its essential flatness. Forhere was a characteristic that challenged the naturalism of Hollywoodnarratives and brought the cartoon widespread attention from the era’savant-garde by suggesting that a similar informing spirit was at work.Even Disney’s animation was, early on, appraised from this vantagepoint. Thus, William Kozlenko (1979[1936]) lauded his cartoons of theearly 1930s because he believed they exemplified the strongest appealof animation; as he offered, ‘the uniqueness of the animated cartoonlies in the fact that, of all film forms, it is the only one that has freeditself almost entirely from the restrictions of an oppressive reality’(p. 246). Yet Disney cartoons, propelled by Walt’s growing concernwith what has come to be known as an ‘illusion of life’ aesthetic,3

would, as the decade progressed, gradually turn from that essentialflatness, first by emphasizing more rounded characters that respondedto forces just like real three-dimensional figures, and second by intro-ducing in 1937 Disney’s far more complex and capable vertical multi-plane camera, a device that would bring the studio an Academy Awardfor technical development. Depth would, as a result, increasinglybecome an important measure of animation skill and even quality, atleast within the industry, just as the Iwerks studio was releasing its lastcartoons in late 1936.

Prior to this point there was, at least in the avant-garde community,a distinct value placed on flatness, owing to the belief that it sup-posedly signaled freedom from a kind of naked naturalism, and thusfrom the world of common experience and common values thatconventional live-action films reflected. From J. Stuart Blackton’s chalk-board drawings that come to life and mutate, to the Krazy Kat andIgnatz cartoons with their nearly-empty or stylized backgrounds, toOtto Messmer’s Felix the Cat, there was the sense that, in the wordsof Esther Leslie (2002), ‘everything in the drawn world is of the samestuff’ (p. 23), graphic representations or simple shapes that wereequally available to the play of the imagination. Leslie further arguesthat a major attraction of early animation naturally follows from thisimpression, as it almost explicitly offered to audiences the ‘dissolutionof conventional reality’ (p. 149), and thus, in a distinctly modernistfashion, made ‘the base show itself’, signaling that it was subject toquestion and eventual change. The protean nature of these early

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 11

cartoons, that is, their consistent reliance on gags based on multiple anddizzying changes, and their sense of a fundamental impermanence, onlyreinforced this reading and furthered hinted of links to the avant-garde.Thus Leslie describes how Felix the Cat’s ‘permutable world’ readilysuggested the surprisingly fluid visions produced by the surrealistmovement (p. 22). Of course, these early cartoons’ frequent transform-ations – such as Felix’s easy conversion of his tail into any tool or devicethat the narrative situation might demand, or Mickey Mouse’s quickadaptation of various farm animals to musical instruments in a film likeSteamboat Willie (1928) – largely followed from the very simplicity ofthe animation, as lines, circles, and basic shapes, unburdened by heftand dimension, easily combine, straighten out, or mutate. But thatresulting combination, of a flat aesthetic and a vision of change,resulted in a sort of formal inconstancy that allowed these creationsimplicitly to both interrogate the cinematic illusion itself and humor-ously insist on the possibility of change in the world to which thecinema rather obliquely referred. It is these dual capacities that largelylinked early animation to the world of the avant-garde and help explainthe level of appreciation that was offered for the relatively flat stylingof the first and more primitive Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonycartoons – works that were lauded by no less a revolutionary spiritthan the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein4 and that were fundamen-tally influenced – and in some cases largely created – by Iwerks.

Certainly, on one level, Iwerks’ cartoons readily show their ownkinship to that combinatory aesthetic of flatness and a transformative,even modernist spirit, and to suggest, at least on a very basic level,some awareness of this appeal. And yet, stylistically these films werealso beginning to anticipate a shift from this paradigm. The mostobvious allegiance to that modernist sensibility shows up in what wemight broadly term the mise-en-scène of the Iwerks films, whichfrequently mirrors the anarchic world of Felix the Cat and of the Fleis-chers’ Out of the Inkwell cartoons. In his Flip the Frog films, madebetween 1931 and 1933, much of the action occurs on a horizontalplane, as Flip walks or drives a car from left to right or right to left;depth is simply less important than movement within a flat space. Andin such a world it seems that almost any inanimate object Flip encoun-ters can easily come to life or change shape, as evidence the anthro-pomorphized autos of The New Car (1931), especially one that donsmake-up to allure new buyer Flip and later gets drunk after acciden-tally lapping up, as if from a dog bowl, spilled bootleg liquor. What ALife (1932) seems practically ruled by a logic of metonymy, as ahowling dog suddenly turns into a seal ‘barking’ for a fish or a ‘shapely’fiddle case becomes a female companion when Flip tries to fool a cop.And Movie Mad (1931) sees Flip trying to sneak into a movie studioby following a fat man, lifting his shadow as if it were literally a pieceof carpet dragging behind him, and attempting to hide under it. Thesimplest impression made by such scenes is that any circumstance, any

12 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1)

thing, or any creature Flip encounters is a potential source for a gag,but at the same time they are sketching an engagingly fluid andprotean world, one of surprising possibility, much like that found insuch key avant-garde films of the era as Ballet mécanique (1924),L’étoile de mer (1928), and Un chien Andalou (1928), and one thatsuggests a modest modernist element ‘animating’ Iwerks’ earlyproductions.

While generally a bit more polished, Iwerks’ Willie Whoppercartoons of 1933–4 find their essence in a similar protean sensibility,although one that has been elevated to an almost formal level by theirconcept, as if that characteristic had been opened up for investigation.For the very subject of these films is change, embodied in the mostwildly improbable of events, typically introduced by Willie asking theaudience, ‘Say, did I ever tell you this one?’ It is his conventionalprelude to the ‘whopper’ of a tall tale that follows and that finds itsappeal in the extent to which his implied narrative manages to stretchreality, usually through various violations of probability and the lawsof nature. One of the few ‘science fiction’ cartoons of the era, StratosFear (1933), nicely demonstrates the general character of these films,even as it also begins to suggest a more problematic attitude that wasbeginning to surface in Iwerks’ films. Beginning with Willie’s visit to a‘painless’ dentist, it shows what happens after he is ‘gassed’: he inflateslike a balloon, rises from the dentist’s chair, bursts through the ceiling,floats into space, and eventually arrives at a strange planet. There heencounters a trio of alien scientists who wield a ray that transformsobjects – a cow becomes a heap of milk bottles and steaks; a pig isturned into hams, sausages, and footballs (pigskins). Later the leadscientist similarly transforms, becoming a seductive, veiled womanwho plies Willie with Mae West’s line, ‘Why don’t you come up andsee me some time,’ only to then return to alien form when he

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 13

Figure 1

Willie Whopper collides with flat spacein Stratos Fear. Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproducedby courtesy of Film PreservationAssociates, Inc.

succumbs to ‘her’ wiles. Willie has, very simply, stumbled into a worldof dizzying transformation, and one that clearly holds much potentialfor interrogating the status quo, particularly with its scientists who alltoo eagerly reduce life to basic commodities.

Yet the film also raises a challenge to that spirit of change, particu-larly as it develops a parallel fascination with flatness. For as Willie triesto escape from the aliens and their transforming ray, he pulls open adoor only to find a blank wall instead of an opening; and when he triesto dive through a window in the background, he bounces back as the‘window’ proves to be nothing more than a drawn shade, decoratedwith an image of the sky and again covering a blank wall. If everythinghere is prone to change or transformation, including Willie who is thencaptured, it also seems like a world from which there is no escape,

14 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1)

Figure 2

The threat of transformation: abeautiful woman turns into an alienmonster (Stratos Fear). Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproducedby courtesy of Film PreservationAssociates, Inc.

Figure 3

Flip the Frog fools a cop by turning hisfiddle into a female companion in WhatA Life. Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayerand reproduced by courtesy of FilmPreservation Associates, Inc.

since it is almost literally a flat world – a cognate to the animatedenvironments that had rendered such transformations the norm. OnlyWillie’s awakening in the dentist’s chair, in another dimension of spaceand time, just as that ray is aimed at him, saves him from also beingtransformed into some unimaginable product.

At the level of plot and conception, this film is certainly one ofIwerks’ most imaginative, as well as one that suggests some awarenessof the character of early animation, and it points up how many of theIwerks cartoons, with relative consistency, seem moved by thatmodernist spirit that Leslie (2002), speaking of other cartoonists of theera, describes as the ‘imaginative work of renewal of matter’ (p. 96).And yet in its images of Willie bursting through the roof of a building,rising beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and even floating amidst variousplanets, the film also suggests a mindfulness of issues of depth anddimensionality, as if it were deconstructing the conventions of manypopular cartoons. Moreover, its plot circuit literalizes the process thatLeslie would accuse the Disney studio of, as it manages to ‘reinstitutethe laws of perspective and gravity, and . . . fight against flatness’(p. 121). In effect, it surprisingly pulls back from that ‘work ofrenewal’, from the spirit of change, and from the flatness that helpedgenerate that spirit, while it also poses a challenge to that spirit, evenhints of a kind of threat implicit in it.

And indeed, Iwerks’ films do increasingly qualify their spirit of trans-formation, further interrogating the aesthetic that had dominated hisearliest efforts. For even in the most anarchic moments of theWhopper series, even as Willie launches into ever greater tall stories,such as the one about his encounter with the devil in Hell’s Fire (1934)or his descent to the ocean’s floor in Davy Jones’ Locker (1934), thereis always a kind of wink at the audience, one codified in his acknowl-edgement of the lie, his concluding challenge to the audience in someof the films: ‘Now you tell one.’ Of course, that challenge readily opensonto alternative readings: as an effort at pulling back from the preced-ing anarchic moments, or as a subversive effort at extending thecartoon’s work by reminding the audience of this world’s constructednature and of their own ability to construct ‘one’ like it – or evenbetter. However, as my introductory comments suggested, filmhistorians have tended to read all of Iwerks’ efforts, including thatrecurring coda, in the former way, as a sign of his own simple playful-ness, particularly in light of Willie’s inevitable return to reality afterconstructing another version of himself for his listeners, a version atwhich we are encouraged to laugh. Of course, reality has beenenlivened by Willie’s often heroic experience, as if the flight of imagin-ation were enough. It seems that Iwerks, like Willie, was increasinglybeing drawn to the three-dimensional world, to the solid world ofmachine rules and physical laws, as if, even at a distance, he may havebeen haunted by the spirit of his mentor Disney and that graduallydeveloping ‘illusion of life’ aesthetic.

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 15

I would suggest that we see Iwerks’ development of his multiplanecamera precisely in this context, as an effort at allowing his cartoonsto move away from – or develop beyond – the sort of modernistconstruct in which they had early on participated by offering anelement of depth and substantiality to balance, if not quite overcome,their essential flatness. Certainly, the relatively small percentage ofmultiplane scenes in his films, even given the general effectiveness ofhis device, suggests that its development could hardly be described asan aesthetic evolution, as a sign of Iwerks’ complete embrace of some-thing approaching Disney’s illusion of life. In fact, animation historianJoe Adamson notes how, even after the development of the multiplanecamera, the Iwerks cartoons ‘kept veering from never-never land intothe twilight zone. Things get really strange’ (Iwerks and Kenworthy,2001: 131).5 But what the multiplane did was to offer a ground for thatstrangeness, an element of balance that, unfortunately, only madeIwerks’ cartoons seem a bit different – neither as challenging as thebetter ‘flatland’ works nor as comfortably within the pale of the newstandard of conventionalized realism that Disney’s efforts were demon-strating.

Built, according to top animator Jimmie Culhane, ‘out of parts froman old Chevy that he [Iwerks] had bought for $350’ (Iwerks andKenworthy, 2001: 130), the Iwerks multiplane camera was a horizon-tally-oriented device – in contrast to the later Disney vertical mechan-ism – that simulated depth of field by placing the animation cels invertical holders along various fixed planes in front of a stationarycamera. Both simple and practical, the device produced a strikingsense of dimension, although one that was never quite as impressiveas a similar device created at the Fleischer studio, which actually usedminiature sets and three-dimensional props,6 nor as well integratedinto the plots or themes of Iwerks’ films as we find in a Disney cartoonlike The Old Mill (1937) or a feature like Bambi (1941). The openingof The Old Mill, for example, is built around a series of track-in shotsthat maximize the new Disney device’s ability to move the cameratowards its layered animation cells, creating a sense of movement intothe world of the various animals that have taken over an abandonedwindmill. The privileged and intimate vision that results forecasts theeffect that Disney would later capitalize on in the live-action format ofits True-Life Adventure films, when it would then exploit the capaci-ties of the new telephoto and zoom lenses to allow the audience tofeel a part of this natural world.

The Iwerks cartoons produced after the introduction of his multi-plane camera, though, offer nothing quite comparable, and indeed,much of the most obvious use of the device seems pedestrian andunimaginative. For example, in Mary’s Little Lamb (1935) we see Maryand her lamb in the foreground, dancing on the way to school, movingfrom left to right against a deep background of countryside. Since thisfilm is essentially a remake of an earlier Flip the Frog cartoon – School

16 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1)

Days (1932) – in which we find almost exactly the same scene, as Flipand his dog frolic on the way to school, the use of depth seems particu-larly uninspired, almost as if were being used primarily to distract audi-ences from the recycled narrative – and indeed from some recycledfootage used here. And it is the pattern of use we find repeatedly inIwerks’ various Comicolor shorts, especially in a string of 1934 efforts,such as The Valiant Tailor, Don Quixote, and Jack Frost. Each narra-tive rather sparingly uses the multiplane, typically by exploiting thenarrative opportunity to have a character, usually brightly colored,move horizontally across the frame, with that movement typically setin contrast to a deep background that is drawn and colored in a pastel,soft-focus style to increase the depth of field illusion. In this regard,then, a relatively late Comicolor short like Mary’s Little Lamb suggestslittle development of the possibilities opened up by the multiplanecamera since Iwerks first introduced it in the previous year’s TheHeadless Horseman.

Yet one of the cartoon’s more interesting variations on this effect isnoteworthy. It involved imposing a static image in the foreground, insuch a way that it masked a small portion of the frame. We see thisapproach in Mary’s Little Lamb when the schoolchildren watch aseries of song and dance performances. Having established thechildren as audience, the cartoon then depicts the performances inthe middle and back of the frame, while black silhouettes of heads andshoulders occupy the frame’s lower margins. Simply achieved, thistechnique neatly combines flatness and depth; in fact, it uses theformer to enhance the latter effect, as if it were trying to strike abargain between two guiding spirits. By no means a novel effect, itwas achieved by placing black cut-outs along the lower border of theframe to create a stark contrast between a dark foreground and lightbackground, thereby suggesting varying lighting levels and effectively

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 17

Figure 4

Conventional use of the multiplanecamera: Ichabod Crane rides across adeep-set landscape in The HeadlessHorseman. CopyrightMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer and reproducedby courtesy of Film PreservationAssociates, Inc.

‘throwing’ the eye deep into the frame. A version of this approachdoes prove more effective in building the eerie effect of IchabodCrane’s ride across a night landscape, done largely in silhouette, as heanticipates a ghostly visitation in the much later The HeadlessHorseman. Yet even here the essential dynamic of the scene remainsunchanged, with Ichabod basically riding horizontally across the framein the sort of conventional depiction of action that typifies mostcartoons of the era, as well as Iwerks’ efforts from both before andafter the introduction of his multiplane device.

What is rather more interesting in The Headless Horseman is notso much the use of the multiplane as the multiple efforts with other,complementary techniques of depth illusion, suggesting that thiscartoon, as the first of Iwerks’ multiplane films, might have been morecarefully designed with depth in mind, as a concerted effort to leave‘flatland’ behind. For at almost every turn in this film we encounter arather different design scheme than typifies many of the earlier Iwerksefforts – one that, while infrequently involving the multiplane camera,does employ a host of visual cues to suggest a three-dimensional world:action is arranged to move between foreground and background,compositions are designed at an angle to create a visual dynamic forthe image, and visual effects – including shots within shots – suggestdifferent levels of reality in the narrative. The combination of suchtechniques hints of an effort at trying to create a different realm ofanimation, a kind of multiplane world.

From its opening, The Headless Horseman stylistically suggests thispossibility of difference, as much of its world is depicted on an axisdiagonal to the frame. An establishing shot opens the narrative,showing the schoolhouse in which Ichabod Crane teaches set at a 45-degree angle in the frame, with a path leading from the school to anouthouse back left and another path leading into the right foreground,effectively tracing a compositional line from left rear to the right frontof the frame. A cut to a long shot of the schoolhouse interior repeatsbut reverses that compositional principle, as we see Ichabod in theright rear of the frame with his desk set at an angle and the students’desks angled into the left foreground. A subsequent scene as Ichabodprepares for Katrina’s party is similarly composed on a diagonal, withtwo walls angling into the background, forming a triangular composi-tion, much like that used in the opening introduction of the centralcharacters (as triangle insets are used for each character). And thisprinciple then recurs as Ichabod enters Katrina’s house, not simplyfrom left or right, but from a door again set at an angle, which enablesthe characters to move diagonally between background and fore-ground, thereby more effectively measuring out space for theaudience. Subsequent shifts in this scene amplify that sense of space,as dinner is announced from the background of the frame, promptingeveryone to rush from foreground to background and crowd throughthe dining room door, and when Ichabod is eventually thrown out of

18 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1)

Katrina’s house for trying to kiss her, it is from the background to theforeground, where he becomes a silhouetted figure against the brightlylit house, so that the light scheme enhances the depth illusion. At itsconclusion, the narrative depicts a church steeple and church bellsannouncing Katrina’s wedding to Brom at an angle in the center of theframe, and it finishes with the wedding scene composed in depth:Katrina and Brom in the foreground and guests arranged in churchpews leading into the background. Suddenly interrupting theceremony, however, is a mysterious headless figure who emerges fromthat deep background, scaring off the bride and groom in the fore-ground, revealing itself as Ichabod in disguise, and thereby suggestinga kind of unexpected ‘depth’ of knowledge in this otherwise simplis-tic and dimensionless character – a depth allowing him to replay thejoke previously played on him by Brom. Other than in this scene andwhen the partygoers run from background to foreground to squeezethrough the dining room door, these compositional patterns do littleto support the humor of the film or to advance the narrative, nor arethey particularly innovative. However, they do project a consciousnessof space, a space presented as substantial and realistic, as if to lead upto and support the similar effects achieved by the multiplane cameraelsewhere in the narrative.

To somewhat mixed effect, the film also employs a variety ofgraphic effects that build another level of dimensionality here. It does,for example, use several wipes and irises that inject a kind of visualdynamism, although they also tend to evoke the sense of a constructedand protean world. Triangular insets, for example, introduce thecentral characters and visually reach across the landscape depicted atthe start of the film, and later diagonal wipes repeat this visual pattern,but simply to suggest shifts in scene. To more effect, the narrativeemploys several circular inset shots to depict Brom’s thoughts whenhe is introduced to his new rival, Ichabod. While the enclosed imagesof a snake, skunk, and a jackass suggest another level of depth, anunspoken psychological dimension, and the manner of their insertionagain injects dynamism into what would otherwise simply be negativespace, they are ultimately the stuff of flat cartoons, closely recallingthe word balloons and common graphic effects of the comics, of anall-too-familiar flat and even static form of animation.

The centerpiece of three-dimensionality, though, is clearly thescenes introducing and demonstrating Iwerks’ new multiplane tech-nology. Early on the cartoon uses it in conjunction with a simulatedtracking shot, as the camera seems to move around Ichabod to revealthat he is reading about the legendary headless horseman while hisstudents are doing their lessons. It is a surprisingly effective shot, sincethe tracking motion, when combined with the multiple planes of thecomposition, seems to occur within real space and to offer an insightinto Ichabod’s character, suggesting that he is a three-dimensionalfigure with secret if unmotivated interests. Yet the following scenes do

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 19

little to develop this potential. Early in the narrative the multiplaneeffect occurs three times, and each instance follows the same simplepattern: a messenger rides to Ichabod with Katrina’s party invitation,moving left to right against a three-dimensional landscape; Ichabodrides to Katrina’s party, moving right to left against that same land-scape; and Brom gallops past Ichabod, also moving right to left withthe same soft-focused landscape forming the background. While thesescenes effectively suggest motion through space, it is largelymovement for the sake of movement, since the action could moreeasily have been handled with jump cuts. This movement simplyanchors the story in a mundane reality rather than building any sortof narrative complexity. A similar pattern also forms the climax of thenarrative, as Ichabod rides horizontally, with his image silhouetted inthe foreground against a dimly lit landscape and fence. The appear-ance of the headless horseman has some dramatic impact, but the hori-zontal action mitigates the effect, since he just appears as a shadowyfigure riding behind and then chasing Ichabod against the same dimlylit landscape. The depth illusion in these scenes is minimal, particu-larly during the chase, since there is little complication to the actionand it occurs largely in shadow. In only one other instance does themultiplane show to some effect – when at Katrina’s house a partygoerbegins telling the story of the headless horseman in front of a fireplace.With the fireplace and fire done as a separate plane in the deep back-ground and the party guests gathered in the foreground, the sceneproduces valuable light and shadow effects, while providing a very realdramatic space to suggest how this specter was influencing the listen-ers’ imaginations; it is a vision that the film even injects into that spacethrough another inset of a silhouetted horseman that the audience hasnow imagined. In this instance the film effectively employs that realspace provided by the multiplane camera to link the real and imaginedworlds, but this sort of dramatic contribution is otherwise generallymissing here.

The last Iwerks films, moreover, show little additional evidence thathe sought to exploit such possibilities. While the Comicolor shorts of1936, works like Ali Baba and Happy Days, clearly show more atten-tion to physical details and to lifelike animation than in the earlierfilms, they also make little use of the multiplane camera, save in thepresentation of backgrounds, particularly in the studio’s last effort,Happy Days. When the Forty Thieves attack a town in Ali Baba, forinstance, the action is largely presented as diagonal movement acrossthe frame, from background to foreground, using screen space butsuggesting its depth only in a conventional manner and essentiallysubstituting frenetic motion for a three-dimensional effect. And at thesame time, these films still offer some throwback elements to theworld of flatness and transformation, as when in Ali Baba a camel’shump opens up like a car hood and a water hose is inserted to fill upits ‘tank’, and when in Happy Days a military hero’s statue, offended

20 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(1)

by a group of boys, suddenly comes to life and blasts them with a stonecanon, the shell of which anthropomorphizes, revealing an angry faceas it chases them and shoots out, in turn, each tire on their car. Ingeneral, though, these late films are marked neither by advanced tech-niques of realistic animation after the Disney fashion, nor by a consist-ent effort to explore and exploit animation’s early strengths – ‘motility,change, movement, and its ability to be everywhere and anywhere atonce,’ as suggested by Leslie (2002: 39). Demonstrating little aestheticconsistency, they are, quite simply, rather plain affairs.

The aim of this brief overview has not been to suggest that the filmsproduced by Iwerks’ studio were important steps in the developmentof a realist aesthetic, nor to argue that Iwerks was himself a kind ofmisunderstood or underappreciated avant-gardist. Rather, my aim hasbeen to investigate the middle ground implied by such perspectives,one wherein we might find a better sense of why his films would havefailed to catch on, and perhaps a better measure of his place in anima-tion history. Michael Barrier (1999) simply suggests that there weretwo rather different pulls at work in Iwerks’ career, arguing that Iwerks‘asserted himself most forcefully . . . by insisting on a sort of mechan-ical perfection’ (p. 167), but that artistically his films were ‘locked intime’, unable to break free from earlier styles (p. 165). The fact thatthe Iwerks studio lasted only from 1930 to 1936 is some testimony tothat view, and certainly a reminder that audiences never quite warmedto its products. But that lack of response, I would argue, partly followsfrom what is implicit in these different pulls and that has never reallybeen articulated: that is, the films’ mixed stylistic message, as theyseem engaged at one level – and probably quite unconsciously – inpursuing ‘the objective of modernism’ for which many other cartoonswere at the time being lauded, and on another in exploring newstandards of realism, similar to that developed more successfully in

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 21

Figure 5

Happy Days’ hardly happy vision oftransformation, as a shell comes alive.Copyright Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer andreproduced by courtesy of FilmPreservation Associates, Inc.

Disney’s work. In effect, they seemed to be caught in a kind ofparadox, variously working at both flattening out and fleshing outtheir animated worlds, resulting in a mixed product that inevitablysent mixed cues to an audience and troubled their response.

The rather problematic nature of these films is also noteworthygiven the period, for they appear – and disappear – at a time whenmodern culture was beginning to witness what Paul Virilio (1994) hasdescribed as ‘the advent of the logistics of perception’, that is, adeveloping emphasis on creating a kind of machinery for standardiz-ing, enhancing, and even controlling vision, or as Virilio puts it, ‘cine-matizing’ reality (p. 12). That logistics would, in a variety of ways, helppush realist tendencies, in part because it would become central tothe practical waging of the Second World War that was already on thehorizon in the mid-1930s, a great drama in which even animationwould come to play a valuable role through its use in training and prop-aganda films – in both of which a semblance of realism would provehighly valuable. Certainly Iwerks’ fascination with the machinery offilm would position him to be a contributor to such developments, toa world in which perspective, line of sight, and depth cues would playcrucial roles. In fact, once he had returned to within the Disney orbitin 1940, he would help advance that logistics by contributing to thestudio’s new hybrid animation program, helping to make possibleone of its most famous propaganda efforts, The Three Caballeros(1945).

Yet ironically, that very move would bring Iwerks’ efforts full circle.For that hybrid work inevitably harkened back to similar efforts in theFleischers’ Out of the Inkwell cartoons, Walter Lantz’s Dinky Doodleshorts, Disney’s Alice in Cartoonland films of 1923–7, and variousother early works that, in blurring the boundaries between the realand the constructed and in foregrounding reflexive effects, celebratedfilm’s power not as a representative form but as a fantastically creativeand transformative medium. In fact, this sort of foregrounding, particu-larly of the very mechanism of reproduction and representation, isprecisely what we find in such avant-garde efforts as Ballet mécaniqueor Walter Ruttman’s animated Opus films of 1921 and 1924 – worksthat testify to the avant-garde’s fascination with the mechanics ofreproduction, while also drawing out of that concern some very unnat-uralistic and nonrealistic effects. While Virilio (1994) has suggestedthat the end result of the cinematizing process is that we would allbecome, as he puts it, ‘victims of the set’, bound to the vision allowedus by the ‘industrialization of perception’ (p. 79), it seems that Iwerkscould sidestep that fate – if not subvert it, in the avant-garde fashion –only by becoming a master of those mechanics. It is a move that wesee forecast in the 1930s when, even as he was drawn towards therealist realm and, through his mechanical endeavors, contributed tothat ‘industrialization’, he was still mining that world of flatness andtransformation for some wonderfully imaginative effects. Yet the

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cartoons that his studio produced could never quite negotiate thisdouble pull, just as they could not help but reflect a similar vacillationin the culture: caught between worlds, between styles, betweennotions of what our cultural works might do. Able to point to thepotentials in both of these approaches but never able to fully exploiteither – and despite Iwerks’ own talent – his could eventually only bea plain cinema.

Notes

1 For background on these and other technical developments and patentscreated by Iwerks, see Iwerks and Kenworthy (2001, especially pp. 193–8).

2 We should note that Barrier’s (1999) description of Iwerks’ increasingtendency to distance himself from the day-to-day animation process is echoedin many other accounts as well, including that of his granddaughter LeslieIwerks and John Kenworthy (2001) who describe how, ‘as Grim’s importancewithin the Studio grew and with Dorothy Webster and Emile Offermannhandling the business matters in the mid-1930s, Ub retired to the refuge ofthe basement’ to work on various technical projects (p. 129).

3 The best account of the development of this aesthetic can be found in thestudy of Disney animation produced by two of the studio’s famous ‘Nine OldMen’, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life: DisneyAnimation. These veteran animators worked on the classic Disney animatedfeatures that first developed the basic principles of the Disney style.

4 Steven Watts (1997) in his critical biography of Walt Disney details themutual admiration that Disney and Eisenstein shared. The Russian, he argues,believed that Disney’s ‘protean animism’ represented both ‘a revolt againstcapitalist rationalization’ and a key contribution to ‘modernist aesthetics’(p. 128). It was an assessment apparently shared by many in the 1930s.

5 That ‘strange’ sensibility might also help explain why Iwerks was able toadapt to a variety of other studios and their styles after closing his ownoperation in 1936. He would, for example, go on to do several Porky Pigcartoons at Warner Bros. and then move to Columbia for several years beforereturning to Disney as a technical consultant in 1940.

6 For discussion of the Fleischers’ three-dimensional turntable apparatus, seeMaltin (1980: 109–10). Perhaps hinting at his dismissal of its importance,Barrier’s (1999) history of Hollywood animation offers no mention of thisdevice.

References

Barrier, Michael (1999) Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its GoldenAge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Iwerks, Leslie and Kenworthy, John (2001) The Hand Behind the Mouse. NewYork: Disney Editions.

Kozlenko, William (1979[1936]) ‘The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney’, inLewis Jacobs (ed.) The Emergence of Film Art, 2nd edn. New York: Norton.

Leslie, Esther (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and theAvant-Garde. London: Verso.

Telotte Ub Iwerks’ (multi)plain cinema 23

Maltin, Leonard (1980) Of Mice and Magic: A History of American AnimatedCartoons. New York: New American Library.

Merritt, Russell and Kaufman, J.B. (1993) Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Filmsof Walt Disney. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie (1995) The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation.Rev. edn. New York: Disney Editions.

Virilio, Paul (1994) The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.

Watts, Steven (1997) The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Wayof Life. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

J.P. Telotte is a Professor of Film Studies in the School of Literature,Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. He coedits the journalPost Script and has published widely on film and media studies,including work on Disney animation. His most recent books are TheScience Fiction Film (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and DisneyTV (Wayne State University Press, 2004).

Address: 3780 West Cooper Lake Drive, Smyrna, GA 30082, USA.[email: jay.telotte@lcc.gatech.edu]

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